Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year: Year of the Pig
Sunday morning. February 18.
My friend Amy invited us to Sunday morning service at the Buddhist Temple where she and her family attend. Her son is in Alison's class, and I really like Amy, so we decided to accept her invitation. It is Chinese New Year, the Year of the Pig. Chinese New Year is a big deal. There are celebrations that go on for days, and many wishes of good luck. It is a new beginning. A new opportunity for good things to happen. Anymore, it seems as though our celebration of the New Year, on December 31/January 1, comes too closely on the heels of a hectic and exhausting Christmas season. We seem to drag into the New Year already worn out, and our wishes for a year filled with joy, blessing, good fortune, new beginnings, etc., seem halfhearted at best. That's why I like the Chinese New Year. It seems fresh.
Our first time at a Buddhist Temple was in China, when we had our babies blessed at the Temple in Nanning. One couple in our group declined to join in the blessing because they were uncomfortable with the whole idea. We're not Buddhist either, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to experience part of the culture of our daughter's birth country. I accepted the invitation this time because, as I said, I like Amy and if I invited her to my church on Sunday morning, I don't think she would decline because she is a Buddhist. I don't know, maybe she would, but Asians tend to be much more polite about those kinds of things than we are. The idea of not going, simply because I don't adhere to the Buddhist religion seems terribly closed-minded. I don't plan on converting, but I also don't want to stick my head in the sand and refuse to learn anything about how other people worship, believe and live. If I'm going to talk about loving others, then it seems hypocritical to go around building walls.
So we went. It was heavy on the incense, and Alison's eyes watered the entire time. Other than that, she sat through the entire hour and fifteen minutes like a trooper. It was all in Vietnemese. The young mother in front of me made her infant a bottle in the middle of the monk's talk (not sure if it was a sermon, or liturgy, since I couldn't understand it), and one little boy played his Game Boy throughout the service. Many people were engaged and quite worshipful - some looked tired, bored and ready to go from the beginning. I didn't find it to be unlike the service at my own church with respect to the diversity of interest.
Instead of a stained glass with Jesus stretching out his arms, there was a giant gold Buddha statue. Instead of praise choruses there was chants and gongs. Instead of bread and wine (juice in my church) there was apples and oranges and a red envelope for good luck. When Alison looked inside the envelope, there was a dollar bill. She liked that. It's much cooler to a six year-old to get paid to come to church than to put part of your allowance in the offering plate.
But I missed my church. I missed the Bible reading and the Apostle's Creed and the exhortation to love other people and make the world a better place spoken in a language I can understand. If could have understood the monk, perhaps this is the message he was giving through the haze of the incense. It might have been. We were welcomed with open arms, smiles and greetings of Happy New Year, and we returned them with smiles of our own. And maybe we knocked a few bricks out of some walls, at least in our own lives.
Happy Year of the Pig!

Smile Fish

Okay, I must learn the names of the fish, because I took photos of them but I don't know what they're called. We bought a season pass (because Alison is a true marine life-lover) so when I go back I'm taking a notebook. It seems rude to label them "the Yellow Fish", "the Blue Fish", etc.)

The Kid

While I was waiting to pick up Colin and Erin at the high school the other day I watched the man in front of me get out of his truck and begin to yell, with arms waving and his face completely red. At first I couldn't tell who he was yelling at, but I was pretty sure it wasn't me. Then I saw him. This nice-looking kid who was about Colin's age was walking out of the school with his backpack on and his hands in his pockets. He had his head down. This was who the guy in front of me was yelling at. This supposed adult was throwing quite a fit, waving his arms and stomping his leg. Then he got back in the truck and revved it up. The kid just kept walking with his head down. The adult then got back out of the truck and proceeded to throw another fit. He was yelling at the kid to hurry. He sprinkled his tirade with expletives and some name-calling. I started feeling sick for the kid. I didn't even want to look at him. But of course I did. He walked right by my car and would you believe he had the most serene look on his face. When he got to the car he took his backpack off before he got into the back cab of the pickup and this brought on another little fit from the front seat. The adult turned around and started yelling at the kid, only this time I couldn't hear it. I was thankful. I got the feeling he wasn't asking him about his day. I felt like crying for the kid, except I kept picturing that serene look, as if he was used to it. That didn't actually make me feel much better. It also didn't make me feel better to realize that this person had no problem acting this way in public. What, can we assume, goes on inside the four walls of the house?
I don't mean to imply that I've never lost it with my kids or that I've never yelled at them. But I will say I've never berated them in public or in private. I try to choose my words carefully, because abuse isn't just limited to the physical. If I had witnessed that man pounding his fists into his son, I would have called the authorities. But what was going on verbally could be just as damaging. Maybe the kid had some kind of defense mechanism that allowed him to close his ears (his heart?) to what was going on around him. Hard to know if that's a good thing or not. Should we report people who are screaming at their kids in public? Should we confront them? Would it do any good?
All I know is that when my two teenagers got into the car that day, the first thing I told them was that I loved them. They looked at me funny, and it didn't make up for what I had just seen, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I can only hope that kid has someone in his life who chooses to say those words every now and then.

Why Are They Poor?

In the February issue of Sojourners, Rose Marie Berger wrote a column titled "What the Heck is 'Social Justice?'" In it, she says this:
"Social charity addresses the EFFECTS of social sin, while social justice addresses the CAUSES of such sins."
Ah. Is that why every time I fill a food basket for the hungry or give money to the guy on the street I kind of have this feeling that I should be doing more? Berger goes on to quote Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara: "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."
For whatever reason, the evangelical churches I grew up in didn't spend much time questioning the whys of the poverty. We continued to do good deeds on behalf of the poor, but we didn't spend time questioning the social framework that causes poverty, and God forbid we suggest that their might be an unjust structure afoot. We mostly blamed the poor for being poor, and quoted Jesus's words in Matthew: "The poor you will always have." But I don't think Jesus said in a throw-up-your-hands kind of way. If God requires dignity and justice for all people, then it seems it is incumbant on us to continue to fill the food baskets, but to also dare to delve a little deeper and dare to challenge...maybe change the unjust system. No one denies that there are poor, hungry people whose circumstances have nothing to do with unjust, sinful structures. But if there was even one person whose was poor and hungry because of the social structures we conveniently ignore, wouldn't it be a sin not to do something to change that?
All of our evangelical interpretations of justice fall into the category of God's justice against moral individual sin. If we talk about justice in a corporate framework, we tend to talk about a nation that has wiped out prayer in school, or has turned from God because we embrace homosexuality or have legalized abortion. But a careful reading of the Old Testament shows that when God was angry with the nation of Israel, he was mostly coming to the defense of the poor which the nation was tromping all over. (See Jeremiah 5:26-29, Amos 2:6-7...and many, many others.) I don't hear much of that coming from the pulpit at my church, or most other churches with which I am familiar. It's too risky and we're too comfortable.
Ron Sider says this: "Imagine what would happen if all our church institutions...would dare to undertake a comprehensive two-year examination of their programs and activities to answer this question: Is there the same balance and emphasis on justice for the poor and oppressed in our programs as there is in Scripture? If we were to do this with an unconditional readiness to change whatever did not correspond with the scriptural revelation of God's special concern for the poor and oppressed, I predict that we would unleash a new movement of biblical social concern that would transform the world."

Good Question

The lesson on China was interesting today. The kindergarten class loved the photos of the goldfish, Temple of Heaven, laundry hanging across the railing on apartment buildings. We listened to Chinese music and talked about kites and chopsticks. They were showing their visitor such wonderful manners. It was sweet and innocent. Then one little blonde girl raised her hand and asked, "Why don't Chinese people keep their little baby girls?"
Okay, it's not that I don't think kids these days are smart, but I hadn't prepared for that one. I looked helplessly at the teacher. "I don't know how much of this you want to get into - "
"Oh yeah, sure go ahead."
Thanks.
So I did. Alison just sat there sort of looking like it was all news to her. Her face got kind of red and she kept looking at her feet. I wanted to walk over to her and say, "but you've heard all this before. You know all this. I even made you a little book that tells the whole story and you LOVE THAT BOOK!" So why was she looking so funny??
I guess it's one thing to hear the story by yourself. It's another to hear it in the middle of all your friends. Maybe it sounds different. Less convincing? The deal is, I believe it. I know without a doubt her birth mother and father loved her. It's just that they live in China, not the US. And they don't have the same choices we have. And they feel backed into a corner and they don't know what to do.
Try explaining all of that to a group of kindergartners. Or your six year-old daughter.
It was a good question. But the answer doesn't always leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling. There's a happy ending for us, but there are all these part of the story that keep hanging around nagging at you. As soon as I finished bumbling around explaining to these five and six year-olds about populations control and China's one child policy and the lack of a social welfare system that takes care of the elderly, Alison was back to normal. I suppose just like everything else that is a part of being adopted, she will have to come to terms with her story. So we'll keep telling it.
"How long ago we said goodbye, our tears mingling together." - Li Cunxu, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms